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Euphorion, by Vernon Lee

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Title: Euphorion Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance - Vol. II

Author: Vernon Lee

Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31304]

Language: English

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Produced by Marc D'Hooghe

EUPHORION: BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE

BY

VERNON LEE

Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro," etc.

Euphorion, by Vernon Lee 1

VOL. II.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

THE PORTRAIT ART

THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO

MEDIÆVAL LOVE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

* * * * *

THE PORTRAIT ART

I.

Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving, which criticism claps with random

facility on to every imaginable school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real--the upright, noble,

trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of artists seeks after the ideal--the ideal which may mean

sublimity or platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a realist or an idealist; we classify

all dead artists as realists or idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral importance. Now

the fact of the case is that the question of realism and idealism, which we calmly assume as already settled or

easy to settle by our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the tangled questions of art-philosophy; and one,

moreover, which no amount of theory, but only historic fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find

realism and idealism coming before us in different ways and with different meaning and importance. All art

which is not addressing (as decrepit art is forced to do) faculties to which it does not spontaneously and

properly appeal--all art is decorative, ornamental, idealistic therefore, since it consciously or unconsciously

aims, not merely at reproducing the already existing, but at producing something which shall repay the

looking at it, something which shall ornament, if not a place, at least our lives; and such making of the

ornamental, of the worth looking at, necessarily implies selection and arrangement--that is to say idealism. At

the same time, while art aims definitely at being in this sense decorative, art may very possibly aim more

immediately at merely reproducing, without, selection or arrangement, the actually existing things of the

world; and this in order to obtain the mere power of representation. In short, art which is idealistic as a master

will yet be realistic as a scholar: it decorates when it achieves, it copies when it studies. But this is only half

the question. Certain whole schools may be described as idealistic, others as realistic, in tendency; and this,

not in their study, but in their achievement. One school will obviously be contented with forms the most

unselected and vulgar; others will go but little out of their way in search of form-superiority; while yet others,

and these we must emphatically call idealistic, are squeamish to the last degree in the choice and adaptation of

form, anxious, to get the very best, and make the very best of it. Yet, on thinking over it, we shall find that

realistic and idealistic schools are all, in their achievements, equally striving after something which is not the

mere reproduction of the already existing as such--striving, in short, after decoration. The pupil of Perugino

will, indeed, wait patiently to begin his work until he can find a model fit for a god or goddess; while the

fellow-craftsman of Rembrandt will be satisfied with the first dirty old Jew or besotten barmaid that comes to

hand. But the realistic Dutchman is not, therefore, any the less smitten with beauty, any the less eager to be

ornamental, than the idealistic Italian: his man and woman he takes indeed with off-hand indifference, but he

places them in that of which the Italian shall perhaps never have dreamed, in that on which he has expended

all his science, his skill, his fancy, in that which he gives as his addition to the beautiful things of art--in

atmosphere, in light, which are to the everyday atmosphere and light what the patiently sought for, carefully

Euphorion, by Vernon Lee 2

perfected god or goddess model of Raphael is to the everyday Jew, to the everyday barmaid, of Rembrandt.

The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic in his figures, exists in the air, light, colour; and in

saying this I have, so to speak, turned over the page too quickly, forestalled the expression of what I can prove

only later: the disconnection of such comparative realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, let us

remember, which can exist in great art) with any personal bias of the artist, its intimate dependence upon the

constitution and tendency of art, upon its preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a given country

and at a given moment. And now I should wish to resume the more orderly treatment of the subject, which

will lead us in time to the second half of the question respecting realism and idealism. These considerations

have come to me in connection with the portrait art of the Renaissance; and this very simply. For portrait is a

curious bastard of art, sprung on the one side from a desire which is not artistic, nay, if anything, opposed to

the whole nature and function of art: the desire for the mere likeness of an individual. The union with this

interloping tendency, so foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait; and by the

position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of

beauty which it is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by the treatment of similar

social interlopers we can estimate the necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are

the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the object of their lives, which is the beautiful.

I have said that art is realistic in its periods or moments of study; and this is essentially the case even with the

school which in many respects was the most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in intention: the school of

Giotto. The Giottesques are more than decorative artists, they are decorators in the most literal sense. Painting

with them is merely one of the several arts and crafts enslaved by mediæval architecture and subservient to

architectural effects. Their art is the only one which is really and successfully architecturally decorative; and

to appreciate this we must contrast their fresco-work with that of the fifteenth century and all subsequent

times. Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly made frame; a gigantic piece of

cardboard would do as well, and better; the colours melt into one another, the figures detach themselves at

various degrees of relief; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are frequently upside down; yet these figures,

which are so difficult to see, are worth seeing only in themselves, and not in relation to their position. The

masonry is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with the cavities and protrusions of perspective. In

Mantegna's frescoes the wall becomes a slanting theatre scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro

Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, is dissolved, the side or cupola of a church becomes a

rent in the clouds, streaming with light.

Not so with the Giottesque frescoes: the wall, the vault, the triumphant masonry is always present and felt,

beneath the straight, flat bands of uniform colour; the symmetrical compartments, the pentacles, triangles, and

segments, and borders of histories, whose figures never project, whose colours are separate as those in a

mosaic. The Giottesque frescoes, with their tiers and compartments of dark blue, their vague figures dressed

in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and purples; their geometrical borders and pearlings and dog-tooths;

cover the walls, the ribbed and arched ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some beautiful brown, blue,

and tarnished gold leather-hangings; the figures, outlined in dark paint, have almost the appearance of being

stencilled, or even stamped on the wall. Such is Giottesque painting: an art which is not merely essentially

decorative, but which is, moreover, what painting and sculpture remained throughout the Gothic period,

subservient to the decorative effect of another art; an art in which all is subordinated to architectural effect, in

which form, colour, figures, houses, the most dramatic scenes of the most awful of all dramas, everything is

turned into a kind of colossal and sublime wall-paper; and such an art as this would lead us to expect but little

realism, little deliberate and slavish imitation of the existing. Yet wherever there is life in this Gothic art

(which has a horrible tendency, piously unobserved by critics, to stagnate into blundering repetition of the

same thing), wherever there is progress, there is, in the details of that grandiose, idealistic decoration, realism

of the crudest kind. Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic Byzantinism;

those who really handed over something vital to their successors of the fifteenth century, while repeating the

old idealistical decorations; were studying with extraordinary crudeness of realism. Everything that was not

conventional ornament or type was portrait; and portrait in which the scanty technical means of the artist,

Euphorion, by Vernon Lee 3

every meagre line and thin dab of colour, every timid stroke of brush or of pencil, went towards the merciless

delineation not merely of a body but of a soul. And the greater the artist, the more cruel the portrait: cruellest

in representation of utter spiritual baseness in the two greatest of these idealistic decorators; Giotto, and his

latest disciple, Fra Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of examples.

In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce--one of the most lovely pieces of mere architectural decoration

conceivable--there are around the dying and the dead St. Francis two groups of monks, which are

astoundingly realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally beautiful life of sanctity which was so fresh in the

memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing beyond a set of portraits of the most absolutely mediocre

creatures, moral and intellectual, of creatures the most utterly incapable of religious enthusiasm that ever

made religion a livelihood. They gather round the dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at all

ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out with wise and righteous labour, a man of thought and action,

upon whose hands and feet the stigmata of supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The monks are

presumably his immediate disciples, those fervent and delicate poetic natures of whom we read in the "Fioretti

di San Francesco." To represent them Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen friars he may have

met in the streets near Santa Croce: not caricatures, nor ideals, but portraits Giotto has attempted neither to

exalt nor to degrade them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interestingness. They are not low nor bestial nor

extremely stupid. They are in various degrees dull, sly, routinist, prosaic, pedantic; their most noteworthy

characteristic is that they are certainly the men who are not called by God. They are no scandal to the Church,

but no honour; they are sloth, stupidity, sensualism, and cunning not yet risen to the dignity of a vice. They

look upon the dying and the dead saint with indifference, want of understanding, at most a gape or a bright

look of stupid miscomprehension at the stigmata: they do not even perceive that a saint is a different being

from themselves. With these frescoes of Giotto I should wish to compare Fra Angelico's great ceremonial

crucifixion in the cloister chapel of San Marco of Florence; for it displays to an extraordinary degree that

juxtaposition of the most conventionally idealistic, pious decorativeness with the realism straightforward,

unreflecting, and heartless to the point of becoming perfectly grotesque. The fresco is divided into two scenes:

on the one side the crucifixion, the mystic actors of the drama, on the other the holy men admitted to its

contemplation. A sense that holy things ought to be old-fashioned, a respect for Byzantine inanity which

invariable haunted the Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators, of men who replaced with

frescoes the solemn lifeless splendours of mosaic; this kind of artistico-religious prudery has made Angelico,

who was able to foreshorten powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, represent the Saviour dangling from the

cross bleached, boneless, and shapeless, a thing that is not dead because it has never been alive. The holy

persons around stand rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background, with vague expanses of pink

face looking neither one way nor the other; mere modernized copies of the strange, goggle-eyed, vapid beings

on the old Italian mosaics. This is not a representation of the actual reality of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's

superb picture at S. Rocco, or Dürer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the hangman,

the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of mystic repetition of it; subjective, if I may say

so; existing only in the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators only in the sense

that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the mystic spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter

to represent is fervent contemplation, ecstatic realization of the past by the force of ardent love and belief; the

condition of mind of St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, Madame Guyon: it is the revelation of the great

tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now, how does Fra Angelico represent this? A row of saints,

founders of orders, kneel one behind the other, and by their side stand apostles and doctors of the Church;

admitting them to the sight of the super-human, with the gesture, the bland, indifferent vacuity of the

Cameriere Segreto or Monsignore who introduces a troop of pilgrims to the Pope; they are privileged persons,

they respect, they keep up decorum, they raise their eyes and compress their lips with ceremonious reverence;

but, Lord! they have gone through it all so often, they are so familiar with it, they don't look at it any longer;

they gaze about listlessly, they would yawn if they were not too well bred for that. The others, meanwhile, the

sainted pilgrims, the men whose journey over the sharp stones and among the pricking brambles of life's

wilderness finds its final reward in this admission into the presence of the Holiest, kneel one by one, with

various expressions: one with the stupid delight of a religious sightseer; his vanity is satisfied, he will next

draw a rosary from his pocket and get it blessed by Christ Himself; he will recount it all to his friends at

Euphorion, by Vernon Lee 4

home. Another is dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot from Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile

by the way; yet another, prim and dapper; the rest indifferent looking restlessly about them, at each other, at

their feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks about the length of time they are kept waiting; those at

the end of the kneeling procession, St. Peter Martyr and St. Giovanni Gualberto especially, have the bored,

listless, devout look of the priestlets in the train of a bishop. All these figures, the standing ones who introduce

and the kneeling ones who are being introduced, are the most perfect types of various states of dull,

commonplace, mediocre routinist superstition; so many Camerlenghi on the one hand, so many Passionist or

Propagandists on the other: the first aristocratic, bland and bored; the second, dull, listless, mumbling,

chewing Latin Prayers which never meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing; both perfectly

reverential and proper in behaviour, with no more possibility of individual fervour of belief than of individual

levity of disbelief: the Church, as it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus does the last of the

Giottesques, the painter of glorified Madonnas and dancing angels, the saint, represent the saints admitted to

behold the supreme tragedy of the Redemption.

Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of the early Renaissance developed up to the utmost, assisted by

the goldsmiths and sculptors, who taught them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element of Giottesque

painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible. Painting could no longer be a decoration of

architecture, and it had not yet the means of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did not achieve, but

merely studied. Among its exercises in anatomy, modelling, perspective, and so forth, always laborious and

frequently abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfactory, mature production was its portrait work, Portraits of

burghers in black robes and hoods; of square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy heads, of bald

and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes; of thinly bearded artizans; people who stand round the preaching

Baptist or crucified Saviour, look on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, heedless, against their

background of towered, walled, and cypressed city--of buttressed square and street; ugly but real, interesting,

powerful among the grotesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and taped-up draperies and

out-of-joint architecture of the early Renaissance frescoes; at best among its picture-book and Noah's-ark

prettinesses of toy-box cypresses, vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the grass, and peacocks on the

roofs; for the early Renaissance, with the one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a childish time of art, giving

us the horrors of school-hour blunders and abortions varied with the delights of nursery wonderland: maturity,

the power of achieving, the perception of something worthy of perception, comes only with the later

generation, the one immediately preceding the age of Raphael and Michael Angelo; with Ghirlandajo,

Signorelli, Filippino, Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries.

But this period is not childish, is not immature in everything. Or, rather, the various arts which exist together

at this period are not all in the same stage of development. While painting is in this immature ugliness, and

ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's and Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced, but less

legitimate kind of painting, painting more successful in the present, but with no possible future; the almost

separate art of portrait-sculpture arises again where it was left by Græco-Roman masters, and, developing to

yet greater perfection, gives in marble the equivalent of what painting will be able to produce only much later:

realistic art which is decorative; beautiful works made out of ugly materials.

The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its life, its power, depend upon death; it is an art

developed in the burying vault and cloister cemetery. During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its reason, its

vital possibility, its something to influence, nay, to keep it alive, in architecture; but with the disappearance of

Gothic building disappears also the possibility of the sculpture which covers the portals of Chartres and the

belfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard Ionic and Corinthian of

Aberti and Bramante, did not require sculpture, or had their own little supply of unfleshed ox-skulls,

greengrocer's garlands, scallopings and wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one or two bloated

emperors' heads, amply sufficed. On the other hand, mediæval civilization and Christian dogma did not

encourage the production of naked of draped ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck on countless

temple fronts, and erected at every corner of square, street, or garden. The people of the Middle Ages were too

grievously ill grown, distorted, hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they may have had an instinct

Euphorion, by Vernon Lee 5

of the kind, and, ugly as they knew themselves to be, they must yet have found in forms like those of

Verrocchio's David insufficient beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle Ages had left no moral

room for ideal sculpture once freed from the service of architecture; they had still less provided it with a

physical place. Such things could not be set up in churches, and only a very moderate number of statues could

be wanted as open-air monuments in the narrow space of a still Gothic city; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of

the early Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but comparatively few in number. There remained,

therefore, for sculpture, unless contented to dwindle down into brass and gold miniature work, no regular

employment save that connected with sepulchral monuments. During the real Middle Ages, and in the still

Gothic north, the ornamentation of a tomb belonged to architecture: from the superb miniature minsters,

pillared and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the cathedral, to the humbler foliated arched canopy,

protecting a simple sarcophagus at the corner of many a street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the

low relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined, cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened

down on his pillow as if ashamed even of that amount of prominence, and in a hurry to be trodden down and

obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed to

obliteration, came the sculptor of the Renaissance, and bade the wafer-like simulacrum fill up, expand, raise

itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised high above the

crowd, draped with brocade, carved with rich devices of leaves and beasts of heraldry, roofed over with a daïs,

which is almost a triumphal arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which the illustrious dead were

shown to the people; but made eternal, and of eternal magnificence, by the stone-cutter, and guarded, not for

an hour by the liveried pages or chaunting monks, but by winged genii for all eternity. Some people, I know,

call this a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious

dead scraped out any longer by the shoe-nails of every ruffian, rubbed out by the knees of every kitchen

wench; but to me it seems that it was due merely to the fact that sculpture had lost its former employment, and

that a great art cannot (thank Heaven!) be pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it may, the sculpture of the

Renaissance had found a new and singularly noble line of work, the one in which it was great, unique,

unsurpassed, because untutored. It worked here without models, to suit modern requirements, with modern

spirit; it was emphatically-modern sculpture; the only modern sculpture which can be talked of as something

original, genuine, valuable, by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity had evaded death, and neglected

the dead; a garland of mænads and fauns among ivy leaves, a battle of amazons or centaurs; in the late

semi-Christian, platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius; at most, as in the exquisite tombs of the

Keramikos of Athens, a figure, a youth on a prancing steed, like the Phidian monument of Dexileus; a maiden,

draped and bearing an urn; but neither the youth nor the maiden is the inmate of the tomb: they are types,

living types, no portraits. Nay, even where Antiquity shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the

beloved; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unindividual. "Sarkophagen und Urnen bekränzte der Heide mit

Leben," said Goethe; but it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life not which had

been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes.

The Romans, on the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as more domestic, less

coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a

desire unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband and wife stare forth

togaed and stolaed, half reduced to a conventional crop-headedness, grim and stiff as if sitting unwillingly for

their portrait; or reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor asleep, nor yet alive and awake, but with a

hieratic mummy stare, have little of æsthetic or sympathetic value. The early Renaissance, then, first

bethought it of representing the real individual in the real death slumber. And I question whether anything

more fitting could be placed on a tomb than the effigy of the dead as we saw them just before the coffin-lid

closed down; as we would give our all to see them but one little moment longer; as they continue to exist for

our fancy within the grave; for to any but morbid feelings the beloved can never suffer decay. Whereas a

portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments

striking us as conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michael Angelo's Pope Julius, and

Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late

Middle Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof, they might indeed place against

the russet brick or the blue sky, amid the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the

Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest: but in the church below, under the funereal pall, they

Euphorion, by Vernon Lee 6

could place only the body such as it may have lain on the bier.

And that figure on the bier was the great work of Renaissance sculpture. Inanimate and vulgar when in heroic

figures they tried to emulate the ancients, the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their own line. The

modesty, the simplicity, the awful and beautiful repose of the dead; the individual character cleared of all its

conflicting meannesses by death, simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the survivors--all these are

things which belong to the Renaissance. As the Greeks gave the strong, smooth life-current circulating

through their heroes; so did these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and harmonious ebbing after-life

of death in their sepulchral monuments. Things difficult to describe, and which must be seen and remembered.

There is the monument, now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor whose name, were it known, would

surely be among the greatest, of the condottiere, Braccioforte: the body prone in its heavy case of armour, not

yet laid out in state, but such as he may have been found in the evening, when the battle was over, under a tree

where they had carried him to die while they themselves went back to fight; the head has fallen back,

side-ways, weighed down by the helmet, which has not even been unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut,

austere features, visible beneath the withdrawn vizor; the eyes have not been closed; and there are few things

more exquisite and solemn at once in all sculpture, than the indication of those no longer seeing eyes, of that

broken glance, beneath the half-closed lids. There is Rossellino's Cardinal of Portugal at S. Miniato a Monte:

the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful

sanctity; the strong delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of suffering and thought, a face of infinite

purity of strength, strength still ungnarled by action: a young priest, who in his virginal dignity is almost a

noble woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo della Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity

with the antique of all these sculptors, as one may see from the shattered remains of the Fonte Gaia of Siena),

the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded bed of state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet upon her

sleeping dog, her sweet, girlish head, with wavy plaits of hair encircled by a rose-wreathed, turban-like

diadem, lying low on round cushions; the bed gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample-bosomed body,

round which the soft robe is chastely gathered, and across which the long-sleeved arms are demurely folded;

the most beautiful lady (whose majestic tread through the palace rooms we can well imagine) that the art of

the fifteenth century has recorded. There is, above all, the Carlo Marsuppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the

humanist Secretary of the Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and curling

acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady

Ilaria are commonplace compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant wavy hair and thin,

gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. The slight figure looks as if in life it must have

seemed almost transparent; and the hands are very pathetic: noble, firm hands, subtle of vein and wrist,

crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but in gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That book

is certainly no prayer-book; rather a volume of Plato or Cicero: in his last moments the noble old man has

longed for a glance over the familiar pages; they have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late;

the drowsiness of death has overtaken him, and with his last sigh he has gently folded his hands over the

volume, with the faint, last clinging to the things beloved in this world.

Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renaissance, its only sculpture, if we except the exquisite work in

babies and angels just out of the nursery of the Robbias, which is a real achievement. But how achieved? This

art is great just by the things which Antiquity did not. And what are those things? Shall we say that it is

sentiment? But all fine art has tact, antique art most certainly; and as to pathos, why, any quiet figure of a dead

man or woman, however rudely carved, has pathos; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling hysterical art which

makes angels draw the curtains of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine ladies, in hoop or limp Grecian dress,

faint (the smelling bottle, Betty!) over their lord's coffin; there is pathos, to a decently constituted human

being, wherever (despite all absurdities) we can imagine that there lies some one whom it was bitter to see

departing, to whom it was bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question; and, if you choose to call it

sentiment, it is in reality a sentiment for line and curve, for stone and light. The great question is, How did

these men of the Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful? For they were not all beautiful in life,

and ugly folk do not grow beautiful merely because they are dead. The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful

Ilaria herself, were you to sketch their profile and place it by the side of no matter what ordinary antique,

Euphorion, by Vernon Lee 7